Cybergeeks Try to Auction Themselves Off Over eBay

Chronicle Staff and Wire Report

Published 4:00 am, Friday, April 30, 1999

Even by eBay's outlandish standards, this auction was a doozy.

Wednesday night, this item went up for bid: "Team of 16 employees from major ISP (Internet Service Provider) willing to leave as a group. Group formed major ISP presence in Silicon Valley/US and is now looking for other challenges and requires an opportunity with a major player."

The asking price: $3.14 million.

The workforce for hire, dubbed ispteam, described itself as a disaffected group of Silicon Valley employees who had decided to bolt their jobs. They declined to identify their employer out of fear of being fired.

Although the group said it received two bids meeting its demands, it canceled the item yesterday.

The $3.14 million price tag was mostly for salaries: $200,000 for the director and $190,000 for each engineer. The group of techies also re quired the additional perks of any self-respecting startup: a $320,000 signing bonus, stock options and offices either in Silicon Valley or San Francisco.

"We were sitting around talking, watching our company disintegrate," an ispteam spokesman told the Associated Press.

Recalling a spoof in which a seller tried to auction off a 16-year-old girl -- eBay yanked that posting -- someone in the group jokingly suggested auctioning themselves as a team on eBay.

For eBay -- which sells nearly 2 million items and could have earned a $40,000 commission from the sale -- the cybergeeks item "certainly is one of the more interesting items we've had," Pursglove said.